Wednesday, January 10, 2018

The 'Right to Try' Legislative Push of the Koch Brothers

According to Stat News, several deep-pocketed political advocacy groups founded by Charles and David Koch are ramping up their advocacy before Congress on a niche issue: access to experimental drugs.

On Monday, according to Stat, several Koch-backed groups, including Freedom Partners and Americans for Prosperity, launched an ad campaign urging Congress to pass so-called “right-to-try” legislation, which aims to help terminally ill patients access experimental treatments that haven’t yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The Senate unanimously passed a right-to-try bill from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) last August, but it has since stalled in the House.

Of course, people, terminally ill or not, should be able to try any drugs they want. But this is going in the right direction.

And here is the reasoning of the bastards against it, Stat reports:

At an October hearing, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned that Johnson’s bill, as written, would broaden access to experimental therapies so much that it might weaken FDA’s drug approval process.

The GOP pretends to be the "market-friendly" party. So why don't they make the FDA process purely voluntary, and see how many doctors and consumers require drug companies to keep jumping through the FDA's hoops vs. looking to other forms of certification as to safety and efficacy? To answer my own question, it's because the GOP is a "crony-friendly" party, and consumers are not their cronies.